AuthorTopic: Living Life From A Third Person Perspective (Read 12340 times)

The term "dissociative" derives from "dissociative anaesthetic", a class of anaesthetics which produce unresponsiveness to stimuli by dissociating various elements of the mind (in simple terms, they knock you out by putting you 'out of your body'). Consciousness, memory, perception, and motor activity are all dissociatied from each other. The dissociative anaesthetics all block the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) neuroreceptor, though many act on other receptors like sigma. Dissociatives are not frequently used as anaesthetics in humans because of what are known as "emergence effects", various odd effects that can happen when people come out of anaesthesia. All anaesthetics can produce these effects, but with the dissociatives it is much more common and much more severe. Dissociative anaesthetics (ketamine and tiletamine) are used in veterinary practice, since animals don't often complain about out-of-body experiences. Ketamine is also used in burn trauma and in children (who don't get the psychedelic effects of the dissociatives, and are not susceptible to dissociative brain damage).

The psychedelic effects of the dissociatives are difficult to explain. They are nothing whatsoever like LSD or related drugs (mescaline, DMT, mushrooms, etc.) but they are clearly psychedelic. The best way I can explain the difference between dissociatives and traditional serotonergic psychedelics is this: Serotonergic psychedelics are Eros, and dissociatives are Thanatos. The serotonergics are Birth, they are sensory overload, focus on the details, awareness of the external universe. The dissociatives are Death, sensory shutdown, focus on the archetypes, awareness of the internal universe. Serotonergics are the "Ana" side of Chaos, dissociatives the "Kata" side of Chaos (Chaos being the essential driving energy behind reality, if you will). Ultimately, they can both take you to the same place -- mystical union, ego-loss, or just plain "trippin' balls" depending on your point of view -- but they take you by different routes. I like to think of both routes as complementary ... but only if they don't hurt you in the process of getting there!

A recent study confirms that nitrous oxide is a dissociative anaesthetic. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Nitrous oxide also depletes vitamin B-12, incidentally.

[...] The so-called "bicameral mind" may be scientifically controversial, but if humans 2,000 or 3,000 years ago did have less communication between the hemispheres, it is possible that their sense of self -- a single, fully intact sense of self -- was comparatively weak and they heard voices coming from within. [...]

Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Julian Jaynes

Back in 1976 when he was a professor of psychology at Princeton, Julian Jaynes published a very controversial theory about the emergence of the human mind. Indeed, even today his theory of the "bicameral mind" remains a controversy. Rather than just harkening to behavioral psychology or brain biology, Jaynes presents his theory from the perspective of psycho-cultural history. Going back to the the earliest writings and studying particularly the many early civilizations of the Near East, Jaynes came to the conclusion that most of the people in these archaic cultures were *not* subjectively conscious as we understand it today. Jaynes provides extensive illustrations -- ranging from Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Egyptian, Early Mycenean, Hebrew, and even Mayan and Asian cultures -- that support his theory of the bicameral mind. But he mainly focuses on Mycenean (Greek) material.

Jaynes bluntly declares "There is in general no consciousness in the ILIAD." Analyzing Homer's great epic, Jaynes came to the conclusion that the characters of the Trojan siege did not have conscious minds, no introspection, as we know it in the modern human. Whether Achilles or Agamemnon, there was no sense of subjectivity. Rather they were men whom the gods pushed about like robots. The gods sang epics through their lips. Jayne declares that these Iliadic heroes heard "voices," real speech and directions from the gods -- as clearly as those diagnosed epileptic or schizophrenic today. Jaynes stresses that the Iliadic man did not possess subjectivity as we do -- rather "he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon." This mentality of the Myceneans, Jaynes calls the bicameral mind. Now what was this bicameral mind? Jaynes briefly discusses brain biology -- in that there are three speech areas, for most located in the left hemisphere. They are: (1) the supplemental motor cortex; (2) Broca's area; and (3) Wernicke's area. Jaynes focuses on Wernicke's area, which is chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. It is Wernicke's area that is crucial for human speech.

Pursuing the bicameral mind, Jaynes focuses on the corpus callosum, the major inter-connector between the brain's hemispheres. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge "collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke's area." And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the "gods" who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give "directions" to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the "two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals." Hence the bicameral mind! Archaic humans were ordered and moved by the gods through both auditory hallucinations and visual hallucinations. The gods mainly "talked" to them -- but sometimes "appeared," such as Athene appeared to Achilles. And "when visual hallucinations occur with voices, they are merely shining light or cloudy fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or Yahwey to Moses." Jaynes believes in the mentality of the early Mycenean that volition, planning and initiative were literally organized with no consciousness whatsoever. Rather such volition was "told" to the individual -- "sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god,' or sometimes as a voice alone."

Now Jaynes thinks the great agricultural civilizations that spread over much of the Near East by 5000 b.c.e. reflected the bicameral mind. These civilizations were rigid theocracies! They were reminiscent of the Queen Bee and the bee-hive. These bicameral societies reflected "hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or works, inventory of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler, and particular to gods." Jaynes contests that such theocracies were the only means for a bicameral civilization to survive. Circumventing chaos, these rigid hierarchies allowed for "lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so" to kings and gods. According to Julian Jaynes, "the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones." In these ancient bicameral societies the idol or the statue was literally the god, so says Jaynes. The god/goddess had its own house. It was usually the center of a temple complex. The size varied according to the importance of the god and, of course, the wealth of the city. In these theocracies the owner of the land was the divine idol -- and the people were the tenants. The steward-king served the god by administrating the god's estates. According to cuneiform texts, the gods also enjoyed eating, drinking, music and dancing. They required beds for sleeping and connubial visits from other gods. They (the statues) were washed and dressed, driven around on special occasions. Ceremony and ritual evolved around these idols.

The collapse of the bicameral mind came slowly, it was a slow erosive breakdown. But Jaynes spotted the first serious indications of collapse by the time of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, around 1700 b.c.e. Authority had started to crumble -- and due to this Egypt had to re-unify itself, hence the Middle Kingdom. Jaynes considers that this slow collapse was caused by natural disasters, such as the Santorini volcanic explosion that devastated many Greek islands. Migration of different peoples into new areas disrupted the bicameral societies already in place. Conquest over peoples by others resulted in further collapse. And writing gradually eroded the "auditory authority of the bicameral mind." Jaynes felt a real tipoff of this bicameral breakdown could be discerned in the Babylonian lines: "My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance... [To Marduk]

It was with this, according to Jaynes, that one could detect for the first time the mighty themes of the world religions: "Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god." For Jaynes this ruin, this bitter bicameral breakdown led to the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. Moving from the ILIAD, Jaynes declares that Homer's ODYSSEY is unlike its predecessor. Here we have wily Odysseus, the hero of many devices, a man of a "new mentality." The ODYSSEY was about a man who was learning how to get along in a "ruined and god-weakened world." With the Golden Age of Greece, in the starstruck sixth century b.c.e., with Solon, with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, Jaynes claims we are now with human minds with whom we can feel mentally at home!

Logged

- "Do you do swear by Almighty God, the Searcher of all hearts, that the evidence you shall give in this issue shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and as you shall answer to God on the last great day?"- "I do."

The third-person perspective can influence your interpretation of past events. Observing yourself as a third person -- looking at yourself from an outside observer's perspective -- can help accentuate the changes you've made more than using a first-person perspective. When people perceive change, they get some satisfaction from their efforts, which, in turn, can give them more motivation to keep on working toward a personal goal.

Definitely the sort of thing that happens to people from time to time. I found out, however, that oftentimes, you switch between the first and third person perspective in how you experience the world.

I don't think there is a person alive that hasn't viewed her life as a movie at least part of every day. It is a completely normal phenomenon and I hope it has nothing to do with being depressed because if it does I have some problems.

Definitely the sort of thing that happens to people from time to time. I found out, however, that oftentimes, you switch between the first and third person perspective in how you experience the world.

I don't think there is a person alive that hasn't viewed her life as a movie at least part of every day. It is a completely normal phenomenon and I hope it has nothing to do with being depressed because if it does I have some problems.

I beg to differ. That feeling of disconnection has everything to do with being depressed. Any psychiatrist will tell you that when people start looking at their lives as books or movies they are distancing themselves because of depression. It is not normal.

Definitely the sort of thing that happens to people from time to time. I found out, however, that oftentimes, you switch between the first and third person perspective in how you experience the world.

I don't think there is a person alive that hasn't viewed her life as a movie at least part of every day. It is a completely normal phenomenon and I hope it has nothing to do with being depressed because if it does I have some problems.

I beg to differ. That feeling of disconnection has everything to do with being depressed. Any psychiatrist will tell you that when people start looking at their lives as books or movies they are distancing themselves because of depression. It is not normal.

An NYT article quotes a couple of studies by Lisa K. Libby and colleagues. One of them looked at the behavior of voters and found that when they were asked to visualize themselves voting from a third-person perspective, they were more likely to be positive towards the idea of voting and more likely to actually vote than voters who visualized themselves voting from a first-person perspective. This finding is obviously very useful for motivation and behavior change therapy.

The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes. But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.

"The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside," the writer Joan Didion has said of "The Year of Magical Thinking," her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. "I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw."

Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University, has also conducted another study in which the researchers recruited 27 college students who on a questionnaire rated themselves as socially awkward in high school. They were then asked to recall a socially awkward event from their high school years, either from a first-person or third-person perspective. Students who were told to take the third-person perspective were more likely than those who were told to take a first-person viewpoint to say they had changed, and were no longer so socially awkward.

But there was another twist to this study.

Immediately after filling out the ratings, students were individually put in a room with a person whom they thought was another student participating in the experiment. But in fact, the other person was an assistant of the researchers (who did not know whether the participant had been told to use the first or third-person in the study). The assistant turned on a concealed tape recorder to see how many times the participant attempted to start a conversation. The assistant also rated the participant on a variety of measures of sociability. The results showed that participants who had viewed their past socially awkward moment from a third-person perspective were more likely to initiate conversation, and were rated as more sociable by the research assistant. "When participants recalled past awkwardness from a third-person perspective, they felt they had changed and were now more socially skilled," Libby said. "That led them to behave more sociably and appear more socially skilled to the research assistant."

Back in 1976 when he was a professor of psychology at Princeton, Julian Jaynes published a very controversial theory about the emergence of the human mind. Indeed, even today his theory of the "bicameral mind" remains a controversy. Rather than just harkening to behavioral psychology or brain biology, Jaynes presents his theory from the perspective of psycho-cultural history. Going back to the the earliest writings and studying particularly the many early civilizations of the Near East, Jaynes came to the conclusion that most of the people in these archaic cultures were *not* subjectively conscious as we understand it today. Jaynes provides extensive illustrations -- ranging from Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Egyptian, Early Mycenean, Hebrew, and even Mayan and Asian cultures -- that support his theory of the bicameral mind. But he mainly focuses on Mycenean (Greek) material.

Jaynes bluntly declares "There is in general no consciousness in the ILIAD." Analyzing Homer's great epic, Jaynes came to the conclusion that the characters of the Trojan siege did not have conscious minds, no introspection, as we know it in the modern human. Whether Achilles or Agamemnon, there was no sense of subjectivity. Rather they were men whom the gods pushed about like robots. The gods sang epics through their lips. Jayne declares that these Iliadic heroes heard "voices," real speech and directions from the gods -- as clearly as those diagnosed epileptic or schizophrenic today. Jaynes stresses that the Iliadic man did not possess subjectivity as we do -- rather "he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon." This mentality of the Myceneans, Jaynes calls the bicameral mind. Now what was this bicameral mind? Jaynes briefly discusses brain biology -- in that there are three speech areas, for most located in the left hemisphere. They are: (1) the supplemental motor cortex; (2) Broca's area; and (3) Wernicke's area. Jaynes focuses on Wernicke's area, which is chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. It is Wernicke's area that is crucial for human speech.

Pursuing the bicameral mind, Jaynes focuses on the corpus callosum, the major inter-connector between the brain's hemispheres. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge "collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke's area." And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the "gods" who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give "directions" to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the "two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals." Hence the bicameral mind! Archaic humans were ordered and moved by the gods through both auditory hallucinations and visual hallucinations. The gods mainly "talked" to them -- but sometimes "appeared," such as Athene appeared to Achilles. And "when visual hallucinations occur with voices, they are merely shining light or cloudy fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or Yahwey to Moses." Jaynes believes in the mentality of the early Mycenean that volition, planning and initiative were literally organized with no consciousness whatsoever. Rather such volition was "told" to the individual -- "sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god,' or sometimes as a voice alone."

Now Jaynes thinks the great agricultural civilizations that spread over much of the Near East by 5000 b.c.e. reflected the bicameral mind. These civilizations were rigid theocracies! They were reminiscent of the Queen Bee and the bee-hive. These bicameral societies reflected "hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or works, inventory of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler, and particular to gods." Jaynes contests that such theocracies were the only means for a bicameral civilization to survive. Circumventing chaos, these rigid hierarchies allowed for "lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so" to kings and gods. According to Julian Jaynes, "the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones." In these ancient bicameral societies the idol or the statue was literally the god, so says Jaynes. The god/goddess had its own house. It was usually the center of a temple complex. The size varied according to the importance of the god and, of course, the wealth of the city. In these theocracies the owner of the land was the divine idol -- and the people were the tenants. The steward-king served the god by administrating the god's estates. According to cuneiform texts, the gods also enjoyed eating, drinking, music and dancing. They required beds for sleeping and connubial visits from other gods. They (the statues) were washed and dressed, driven around on special occasions. Ceremony and ritual evolved around these idols.

The collapse of the bicameral mind came slowly, it was a slow erosive breakdown. But Jaynes spotted the first serious indications of collapse by the time of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, around 1700 b.c.e. Authority had started to crumble -- and due to this Egypt had to re-unify itself, hence the Middle Kingdom. Jaynes considers that this slow collapse was caused by natural disasters, such as the Santorini volcanic explosion that devastated many Greek islands. Migration of different peoples into new areas disrupted the bicameral societies already in place. Conquest over peoples by others resulted in further collapse. And writing gradually eroded the "auditory authority of the bicameral mind." Jaynes felt a real tipoff of this bicameral breakdown could be discerned in the Babylonian lines: "My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance... [To Marduk]

It was with this, according to Jaynes, that one could detect for the first time the mighty themes of the world religions: "Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god." For Jaynes this ruin, this bitter bicameral breakdown led to the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. Moving from the ILIAD, Jaynes declares that Homer's ODYSSEY is unlike its predecessor. Here we have wily Odysseus, the hero of many devices, a man of a "new mentality." The ODYSSEY was about a man who was learning how to get along in a "ruined and god-weakened world." With the Golden Age of Greece, in the starstruck sixth century b.c.e., with Solon, with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, Jaynes claims we are now with human minds with whom we can feel mentally at home!

Wernicke's area is in the posterior temporal lobe and surrounds the primary auditory area. That is quite obvious, because of the links between listening and speaking. Words reach A1 and, then, Wernicke's area, which contains sound images of heard words. Hence, thanks to this area, we can comprehend the words we hear. The information is sent to the Broca's area by the arcuate fasciculus. Broca's area is situated in the left inferior frontal region and creates those programmes for moving the organs we use to articulate words (mouth, tongue, etc.)

The mind in not the brain. The mind is an energy field. The brain is a physical 'switchboard' between the mind and the body. Research has shown that words are stored in a specific area on the left side of the brain. What is not so well known is that there is an equivalent area in the right half of the brain which is also involved with language. Both these areas are called the Wernicke's area. According to Professor Julian Jaynes, lecturer in Psychology at Princeton University, up until around 3,000 years ago, mankind was basically not conscious as he is today. He did not think in terms of concepts, and he was not introspective (i.e. he did not 'turn inwards and think about himself). Instead he operated with what is called a "bicameral mind". The bicameral mind was man's mind before he developed self consciousness. Early man did not make any decisions on his own. The concept of "self", of being independent and self-reliant, did not exist. Whenever a decision had to be made, early man looked for a "sign" from an outside authority, such as a king or a god, to tell him what to do. For example, if he went along a road which divided into two roads, he might throw some stones into the air to see which way they fell, to tell him which road to take. Other signs that early man used to determine what action he should take when he was faced with a decision were often "voices" which he heard in his head and which brought immediate obedience. Experiments have shown that if the Wernicke's area in the left half of the brain is electrically stimulated during speech, it will interfere with the ability to talk properly, almost halting speech.